LET'S, LET'S GO BACK TO THAT – THAT PERIOD THIRTY YEARS AGO, AND DO YOU THINK THAT… I… THAT PEOPLE EXPECTED THAT THE SUPREME COURT WAS GOING TO STRIKE DOWN THIS SEGREGATED SYSTEM?

Thomas R. Waring:

Well, it's very difficult to read the minds of the Supreme Court, or any other political body. I think many southerners felt the time had come to accept changes, and many others felt the time had not come, that there was still a cultural gap between the races that uh, that would make it very difficult to carry on public school education in the formative years of children's lives, when they came from such totally different backgrounds and had different uh, codes of behavior and different viewpoints on, on uh, how to behave. So uh, it was uh, quite a shock to southerners to be told that the way they had been running their affairs for many, many years was no longer acceptable to the nation as a whole. And a great many of the older crowd of white souther-southerners felt that they had – they came of an ancestry that were founders of the republic, and that knew the Constitution, and customs, and laws of the country as well as anybody else,** in any other region. There were strong advocates of states' rights even though the Civil War had curtailed states' rights to some extent, it had not exploded them altogether. And so, the, the souther – the white southerners, especially, and some of the black southerners too resented the power of the federal government interfering with how we had lived our lives for many, many years.